3 Body Problem 's John Bradley Talks About That Shocking Third Episode and the One Thing He Didn't Get to Do on Game of Thrones

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_This story contains major spoilers for “Destroyer of Worlds,” the third episode of 3 Body Problem_.**

John Bradley never got his surprise Game of Thrones death. As the steadfast Samwell Tarly, he made it all the way to the end of the HBO series, despite countless other characters meeting gruesome fates.

But in the new Netflix series 3 Body Problem, which Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss and co-showrunner Alexander Woo adapted from Liu Cixin's beloved sci-fi novels, it’s finally Bradley’s turn. At the end of episode three, his character Jack Rooney is killed at the hands of the mysterious Tatiana (Marlo Kelly), an emissary working for an alien species known as the San-Ti. He brushes her off; she makes him pay.

Jack's death marks an early shocking moment (of quite a few) in 3 Body Problem. He’s the first of the principal characters—a group of brilliant university schoolmates—to go, just as the plot starts to rev its engines and the audience begins to understand why there have been a series of mysterious deaths in the scientific community around the globe.

At first, Bradley was disappointed to learn his time on the show would be short. But the more he thought about it, the more he came around. Having worked with Benioff and Weiss before, he knows they don't kill carelessly. "The fact that they thought that Jack's death would affect an audience enough to make it worth doing at the end of episode three, and also challenging me to have three episodes to make an audience care that he dies—I took that to be really flattering and a real acting challenge I felt I had to rise to,” Bradley says over Zoom. “To make people miss him, and make an audience wish that he had stuck around a little bit longer."

Despite his initial dismay at learning his time on 3 Body Problem would be brief, Bradley actually wasn't super-eager to sign on for another long running drama after Game of Thrones. The actor from Manchester had wanted to broaden his horizons and play a range of characters distinct from Jon Snow’s sweetly-naive sidekick Sam.

But because the request came from Benioff and Weiss, the gig was an easy yes. "I think if anyone else would have asked me, I'd have asked more questions and thought about it for a bit longer," he says. "But because I know that they know me so well, having spent so much time with them and they're so good at writing to people's strengths— I just knew that I was going to have a lot of fun with it."

Jack Rooney, a scientific genius who has used his smarts to make a fortune in snack food, is not in the books on which the series is based, but Bradley used the texts to try and understand some of the convoluted science of the story. Bradley explains that when Benioff and Weiss pitched him, they explained they wrote the part with him in mind. They told him, "It's closer to your own character than any character you've ever played before."

Jack has a confidence that most of Bradley’s characters—whether that's Sam or underlings in movies like Moonfall—tend to lack. "I seem to be the go-to guy for [characters] who have big opinions about things, big ideas and valid ideas, but people underestimate them all the time and they never really give them the chance to say them on the platform," he says. "But the thing about Jack is he doesn't wait for people to give him a platform. He'll just say stuff. I think that's a part of me, definitely, but I think it's the part of me that I wish that I was all the time."

Jack’s backstory involves a working class upbringing similar to the one Bradley had, which the actor believes allows the character to speak truth to power. "We're not supposed to be physics prodigies and we're not supposed to be actors in Hollywood making these kinds of American movies," he says. "So I think the attitude is, come in, but take your place in that dynamic. Don't be meek. Don't be a coward. Don't be intimidated by the people around you."

That said, it's that very willingness to speak his mind that gets Jack's throat slit. In the leadup to his demise, Jack and his friend Jin (Jess Hong) have been playing a strange virtual-reality video game in which they're transposed into other universes that they have to save via complicated mathematical problem solving. But Tatiana reveals it's not really a game after all: It's a way of saving the San-Ti, who are slowly but surely headed toward Earth. Jack thinks that's a ridiculous notion, which dooms him.

The leadup to filming the murder sequence was "eerie" for Bradley—"It felt a bit like being present at your own funeral," he says—but the experience was drawn out over time. In fact, what you see on screen is a composite of footage shot at three different times between April 2022 and February 2023. All the work, which included the blood rig on Bradley's neck misfiring at one point, was worth it. He was "delighted" and a little bit emotional when he saw the final product.

"I was really really happy with it and hope that it stays with people," he says. "I just hope they care."

Originally Appeared on GQ